Yes, it’s time for another Microsoft rant. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that these rants are usually quite justified (unlike some others I’ve read).
How long should it take to create an e-mail template? Go ahead, take a guess. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Twenty?
Try 45 solid minutes!
Before I sat down, I thought to myself, “Self, how hard can it be to create a template in Outlook 2000? Sure, it’s older software, but it’s Microsoft, right? Made for the average computer user.”
Whatever. I gave up and had to just copy and paste my layout into a new e-mail. I suppose I’ll have to do this each time I need to use this particular design. Very frustrating. It seems that the deeper into Outlook you dig, the worse the user interface gets and the less things make sense. I found some VERY wacky things in there under the templating and forms menus. Quite frightening.
This makes me want to switch to a different e-mail client. Any suggestions?
Mail.app
Actually, all my mail goes to GMail. I would use Mail with IMAP if there were an open source webmail as good as GMail (and if I had the time to bother with such things). I used Thunderbird for a while back in my Windows days. It’s not bad, but I was never a big email guy, so I don’t really know.
I tried Thunderbird while I was at SAS. It was better than Outlook, but didn’t quite scratch all the right itches for me. I use Gmail for most of my accounts now too, but for one customer I’m still using a desktop program.
I haven’t heard of Mail.app before. Thanks for the suggestion. Yet another reason to switch to a Mac, right?